Sunday, November 5, 2017

Is Trump Smarter Than A Fifth-Grader?

When it comes to Trump’s boasting about
how ‘smart’ he is, the Los Angeles Timessays what a lot of us
have been thinking.

Anyone who feels
compelled to boast how smart he is clearly suffers from a profound insecurity
about his intelligence and accomplishments. In Trump’s case, he has good reason
to have doubts.

So, is Trump really smarter than a
fifth-grader?

PR Newswire cites a Carnegie
Mellon University study, and others, that show just how low Trump’s
intellectual skills really are.

An earlier
analysis by the Boston Globe used the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, which is
based on average sentence length and average number of syllables per word, and
found Trump speaking at a 4th grade
level, two grade levels below his peers.

Trump’s obsession with talking about
‘winning’ is also a sign that his claims of mental superiority are nonsense.

If you were to
market Donald Trump’s vocabulary as a toy, it would resemble a small box of
Lincoln Logs… He prefers to link short, blocky words into other short, blocky
words to create short, blocky sentences that he then stacks into short, blocky
paragraphs…. His comments from an August 11 news conference in Michigan earned
only a 3rd-grade score.

Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine offers this
explanation of Trump’s brain-bragging.

Donald Trump’s
mental capabilities, or lack thereof, have been in the news recently. Secretary
of State Rex Tillerson reportedly called him a “fucking moron,” and then
pointedly refused to deny having said it… And so Trump has been forced to
remind the country that elected him, sort of, that he does in fact possess a
keen intellect.

If Trump has to keep telling people how
‘smart’ he is, it must mean that he doesn’t think it’s obvious.